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Here was a point made by someone on a popular tech/nerd website I visit. It relates to the book The Golden Transcendence by John C. Wright. I thought it was interesting.
As an example as just one of the concepts presented, we can look at the idea of ‘sensefilters.’ Perception is no longer what organic senses directly tell the mind. The signals received by the body or remote bodies are processed to be acceptable to the person’s particular preferences. If a person doesn’t like to see advertising, their mind eliminates the advertising from their vision and fills in the scene with what would be there if the advertisement wasn’t there. Consciously, the person isn’t aware of this, only that they have requested not to see advertisements. Sensefiltering can be used to remove (or add) objects, people, and even ideas from an individual’s perception. The plot devices are interesting stuff that Mr. Wright explores in just enough detail to keep you wanting more throughout the trilogy.
Something struck me about this idea…
Something worth thinking about is the idea of the merge between life experience and advertising. For example an advertisement might display a woman roller-blading or smiling. How would your sensefilters be able to tell a difference between an “advertisement” that contained nothing but a picture of a woman’s face, and a woman sitting still on a park bench, say… reading or something?
The idea of sense filtering is pretty interesting at first, but there are several important implications. If the purpose of the “sensefilters” was to filter out things (and people) that you don’t want to see, then how would you ever learn about anything new? There would be no chance of retribution from that person that told you off one day only for you to remove them from your “accepted contacts” list. You’d essentially be turning yourself into a machine with no room for the exceptions that inhabit our everyday lifes.
Maybe I’m weird, who knows…